Amazon Chime is Amazon's new entry into the UC space, offering a 'secure, real time, unified communications services' that obviously leverages the company's AWS platform. The public cloud and cloud communications have seemed like quite distinct worlds through this point, with voice services needing special sauce relative to what raw cloud computing infrastructure has offered.

Level 3's move to deliver Amazon Chime is clearly positioned to challenge the status quo in that regard. They bring their global networking capabilities to the table, with extensive experience delivering various flavors of VoIP and UC, while leveraging Amazon's raw scale in cloud infrastructure. While Level 3 isn't putting all its eggs in one basket on UC, they are definitely looking to hitch a ride should Amazon's UC train really be ready to leave the station.

Of course, with the CenturyLink merger hanging overhead and likely to be complete in the coming months, it should be interesting to see what the combined company does with this sort of initiative.